...more than you can chew

Just started reading Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse recently. I highly recommend it's reading. Although it lacks, so far, any air-tight case against any of the calumny he rails against, he does provide a road map to congressional investigators looking for the smoking guns to any number of Big Brother-type abuses committed by this insane administration.

His point is mainly to stir the pot. So, if you are looking to have your pot stirred...

Good for you, Mr. Bush...oh wait, nevermind

Before anyone applauds Bush for doubling AIDS funding in developing nations, keep in mind we are talking about President George W. Bush.

Witness the clusterfuck (and really, read the whole thing):

Over the past six years George W. Bush's faith-based Administration and a conservative Republican Congress transformed the small-time abstinence-only business into a billion-dollar industry. These dangerously ineffective sexual health enterprises flourish not because they spread "family values" but because of generous helpings of the same pork-heavy gumbo Bush & Co. brought to war-blighted Iraq and Katrina-hammered New Orleans--a mix of back-scratching cronyism, hefty partisan campaign donations, high-dollar lobbyists, a revolving door for political appointees and a lack of concern for results.

One of the chief cooks is a media-shy 63-year-old Catholic multimillionaire, welfare privatizer and Republican donor named Raymond Ruddy. With close ties to the White House, federal health officials and Republican power brokers that date back to W.'s days as Texas governor, Ruddy has leveraged his generous wallet and insider muscle to push an ultraconservative social agenda, enrich a preferred network of abstinence-only and antiabortion groups, boost profits for his company and line the pockets of his cronies--all with taxpayer dollars.

[snip]

"There are three areas we're about," Malloy said. "We're promoting pro-life causes, abstinence and HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa and we're now moving with that into China." In addition to lavishly funding an army of antiabortion and abstinence-only groups nationwide, Gerard also pumps hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Federalist Society, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council and other conservative causes. Through Gerard, Ruddy contracted Chuck Donovan, vice president of FRC, to write an "investigative" attack on Planned Parenthood, published in Crisis magazine. Gerard also underwrote a propaganda video touting Uganda's discredited abstinence-only HIV prevention program.

The answer is "no". The question, of course: "Is there anything--anywhere, on any level--that this administration doesn't manage to fuck up?"

Jobs up in May...June will be a whole 'nother story

Oh, this is really very sad...

RNC fires phone solicitors
Published May 31, 2007

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent fall-off in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff last week and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, the fired staffers told The Times.

If your conscience and browser allow you to click thru to the Moonie Times, you can read the whole thing.

The Madness of King George XLIII

Who would have thought that you could learn anything from history? I am currently reading Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers and read this in the chapter on Washington's farewell address:

Although [Washington] actually lost more battles than he won, and although he spent the first two years of the war making costly tactical mistakes...by 1778 he had reached an elemental understanding of his military strategy; namely, that captured ground--what he termed "a war of posts"--was virtually meaningless. The strategic key was the Continental Army. If it remained intact as an effective fighting force, the American Revolution remained alive. The British army could occupy Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and it did. The British navy could blockage and bombard American seaports with impunity, and it did. The Continental Congress could be driven from one location to another like a covey of pigeons, and it was. But as long as Washington held the Continental Army together, the British could not win the war, which in turn meant that they would eventually lose it. [emphasis mine]

This must be what our current President has in mind (if anything) when it comes to Iraq. There is no strategy for winning. We can only ape the strategy of the 18th century British armed forces and occupy. Leaving means losing, so the only "not losing" option entailed in our current strategy is to remain. We hear the importance of achieving victory without hearing how that might be achieved. We are told what a free Iraq would look like (Euro Disney?!?) but signs of this transformation are noticeably absent.

If the we occupy all of Baghdad and quell the violence there (unlikely--just today there are reports of the first insurgent artillery (!) attacks on our troops, a sign that this is moving beyond IEDs and mortars) this will not change the fact that we are an occupying force in a land that is not our own. Like the Continental Army, the insurgents will just move and wait.

The complexity of the situation has progressed far beyond a solution (if there is one) achievable through military means. I am convinced that our military presence there only adds to the civil deterioration. For a taste of this, you should really read Nir Rosen's article in the New York Times Magazine on Iraqi refugees.

Perhaps if Bush read more history and less Camus, he could have seen that Washington had Iraq figured out by 1778; perhaps he already does understand this, thus his insistence that we never really leave Iraq--his wish for a pony for every Iraqi man, woman, and child never materialized and the only thing he can think to do is stay.

Again, we go to Ellis: "[Washington] was a rock-ribbed realist, who instinctively mistrusted all visionary schemes dependent on seductive ideals that floated dreamily in men's minds, unmoored to the more prosaic but palpable realities that invariably spelled the difference between victory and defeat" [think "a free, stable, and democratic Iraq"].

So the next time a war apologist tries to frame our actions in Iraq in terms of the difference (parsed, in this case, to a fare-thee-well) between Jeffersonian idealism and Jacksonian exceptionalism, you can feel confident in telling them to go fuck themselves--they don't know what the hell they are talking about.